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It’s midway through this month of fundraising for A Paper Bird. Please consider giving $5, $10, $100 — whatever you can – to keep us going strong.

If you visit this site regularly, you’ll agree: it gives a bit more than most blogs do. That’s why it’s been cited, and praised, from the New York Timesto the Nation.

It shines light on injustice. News about the crackdown on trans and gay people in Egypt has largely spread from here: we’ve been an indispensable source for journalists and human rights activists alike, inside and outside Egypt. We helped stoke the storm of indignation that freed 26 men in the most publicized Egyptian “debauchery” trial – an unprecedented victory.

It gives you facts behind the slogans. For analysis of why ISIS murders “gay” Iraqis, or what made Putin put Russia’s activists in his sights, or what’s the truth underlying rumors from Iran — you can turn here.

It asks the hard questions. What’s the real impact when the World Bank links preventing maternal mortality to LGBT rights? How do Western leaders’ bold promises to defend queer Africans play out on the ground? What does it mean when “vulture fund” bankers support gay marriage internationally? What are the hard choices we make in fighting for free speech?

This blog is still mainly solo work. I want it to become something bigger, more wide-ranging. Your generosity can help fund some of my own research and travel. If worse comes to worst, it can pay my legal fees in Egypt. But it can also:

Support some of the people who have been helping with research and translation (from Russian, Arabic, Farsi,and Hindi, and more) out of sheer dedication – but who deserve something more.

Help bring guest writers and new voices into the blog. The writers I’d like to see are activists from the South who don’t enjoy the cushion of time and leisure that lets Westerners opine for free. They deserve to be recognized – and reimbursed.

From now till June 5 – that’s my birthday – I’ll keep cajoling you to give a little to a site that gives you facts, scandals, sex, shocking pictures, snarky captions, stories of rights and wrongs, and ways to fight back. Press the Paypal button. Do what you can. And, as always, thanks!

You gave this blog your attention, and I’m incredibly grateful. Now please consider giving a little more — $5, $10, $100, whatever you can – to keep us going strong.

When I started writing here back in 2011, I thought of it mainly as a place for my own cantankerous, informed, but often infuriating opinions. It still is. It’s become something more. Paper Bird is no parrot. It’s escaped the cage of my intentions. The site is irritant, forum, megaphone. With your constant prodding, it’s analyzed and argued about faith, fraud, fashion, debt, the inequities of global economy, citizenship, migration, militarism, and much, much, more — not to mention sex; there’s always sex. It’s told urgent stories many people would never know of otherwise.

For example:

Thisblog’s 2013 story on skinhead violence in Russia was the first to explain what lay behind neo-Nazi attacks on LGBT people. It attracted more than 75,000 readers — and shaped much of the later international coverage.

Our report on Mona Iraqi’s raid on a Cairo bathhousebroke the news to the world only a few hours after it happened— and still delved deep into the politics and context. It drew almost half a million readers, the majority from Egypt. It helped make this a human rights issue at home, and stoked the storm of indignation that acquitted the men five weeks later.

Our essay on Charlie Hebdowas read a million times on this website, and reprinted from Denmark to Brazil. People defend free speech by debate, not acquiescence – and the arguments started here.

This blog can do way more. I’m asking for your support because this is still largely a solo effort. I want to give more time; I also want the blog to become something bigger, more diverse. Your generosity can fund some of my own research and travel (and help repair my old Mac, out of commission for six months now in Cairo). If worse comes to worst, it can help pay my legal fees in Egypt. But it can also:

Support some of the people who have been helping with research and translation (from Russian, Arabic, Farsi, Hindi, among other languages) out of sheer dedication – but who deserve something more.

Bring guest writers and new voices into the blog. The writers I’d like to see are activists from the South who don’t enjoy the cushion of time and leisure that lets Westerners opine for free. They deserve to be recognized – and reimbursed.

From now till June 5 – my birthday, by the way – I’ll be nudging and cajoling you to give a little to a site that gives you facts, scandals, sex, shocking pictures, snarky captions, stories of rights and wrongs, and ways to fight back. Press the Paypal button. Do what you can. Since this is a fundraiser, I’ll throw out a cliché you’d never read on the regular pages: You, faithful readers, are the wind beneath our wings.

Lock your door if you like, but I’m still watching: Mona Iraqi as Big Sister, in an ad for her program El Mostakhbai (“The Hidden”)

How does it feel to be unsafe in ur own house, scared and your stomach hurts hearing ur elevators doors open, random foot steps outside thinking they might be coming to get you, becoming someone else but yourself just because they can’t accept you the way you are, afraid to love and be loved, not because ur heart might get broken. NO it is because u can’t be who you are even in ur own home with someone you love. Afraid you might get killed in front of everyone and they will be happy and supportive to your killer just because u r not one of them. Happy new year.

A gay Egyptian friend wrote that on Facebook on December 31. It reflects how many in Egypt feel — whatever their identities — after a year of fear, a year of intensifying police repression and political regression.

The collusion between supposedly independent media and the state has been key to consolidating Egypt’s new dictatorship. This week Buzzfeed reported the claim by Ibrahim Mansour, editor of Tahrir News, that “There are instructions from the state apparatus” to cover sex scandals and other “silly” issues. Mansour believes “the government wanted coverage of arrests for homosexuality and other ‘morality’ charges in order to distract from political stories that could expose how the government had betrayed the hopes of the revolution.”

But it goes deeper. The state knows how to bully or buy media to mouth its political line. Help in getting salacious sales-boosting stories is merely one reward for cooperation. This week a tape mysteriously leaked, apparently recorded during last year’s presidential campaign; in it, Abbas Kamel, head of Generalissimo Sisi’s office, gives the armed forces’ official spokesman detailed orders to exploit reporters. He instructs the PR flack to reach out to “our people in the media,” and command them to “create a situation” and “rile people up.” One snippet plumbs the depths of sycophancy to which journalists can sink:

Kamel also mentions media personality Mahmoud Saad, saying he had recently received a call from Saad asking what he did wrong, and that he heard he had upset “them.” “He told me that we had already agreed and that he loves and supports [Sisi],” he said, before dismissing Saad, saying “we can leave him for now.”

In Egypt, embarrassing tapes leak so often these days you could irrigate crops with them. They may suggest cracks in the military’s support for Sisi, or perhaps fractures between the military and the security services. They also point an ambience around Sisi reminiscent of Beckett’s Krapp or the noxious Nixon, a paranoiac multiplication of microphones where nobody knows who’s wiretapping whom. But the perverse copulation between journalists and generals remains a central fact in Egypt’s loss of freedom.

Two activist colleagues recently wrote essays on the implications of TV presenter Mona Iraqi’s disastrous escapade. With their permission, I’m publishing them here.

Ramy Youssef is an activist working on human rights and issues of harassment. He wrote (in English):

I was wondering: if I’d get the chance to talk to Mona Iraqi and have a discussion with her, what would I say? I tried hard to exclude any violent ideas that might be floating vigorously in my head, and focus on the verbal actions.

Not hidden for long: Mona Iraqi, played by Naglaa Fathy, listens to the shocking goings-on next door

Mona Iraqi, who became one of the most famous and controversial persons in Egypt at the moment due to her heroic action in leading the extraordinarily smart morals police department to a demonic place where people bathe — God, isn’t she a real savior, intervening with unbelievable bravery to stop all these people from bathing and get them all into a police van wearing nothing but towels. Not only did she do this, but also she took the time to video record all these people being led into the police van semi-naked, and broadcast it on her TV show.

Last Monday, January 12, the court announced the verdict after the arrestees spent 35 days in prison. There were all found innocent. While they were in jail, Mona Iraqi was on a different mission to spread awareness and deliver knowledge to our society. On her show, she declared a mere assumption about their sexuality based on zero evidence, and no right. She said that they are part of a male prostitution network, which participates actively in transmitting HIV to thousands and thousands of people. That’s what you get for having a bath, faggot!

On the second episode of the show, and after a two weeks campaign against her led by activists, journalists and movie makers that led to her expulsion from SHNIT – the International Short Film Festival – she decided to attack those who dared misunderstand her Nobel-Prizeworthy activities.

I talked on a TV channel after the bathhouse was raided, saying how I believe this is a setup to polish the image of the government. She played that interview, along with her comments that I’m just a phony who visits Europe twice a month with nothing on his mind about helping actual homosexuals. Pardonnez-moi,aren’t you just back from Paris? I will not go through explaining that everything she said is lies; that’s obvious.

Mona, you are not allowed by law to film anyone getting arrested, for any reason at all. You know that. You are not allowed to lead the police anywhere, even if it was Al Qaeda Central Offices, you do know that as well. You realize that what you did was shameful, terrible and incredibly immoral. You realize that what you did has nothing to do with “sex trafficking.” If you wanted to discuss “sex trafficking,” why go after people who pay 25 pounds to have a bath, instead of making a story about the state officials who are involved in sex trafficking on an international level? Oh, I forgot, that would cut off your financial support for a while.

The interesting part is she didn’t “out” anyone, for real — she did something far worse: she made an assumption about 26 people’s identities, sexualities and practices, and then outed her presumptions, broadcasting the idea that this is truthful!

What Mona Iraqi did cannot be forgotten until she and whoever cooperated in this get the rightful punishment. People’s lives aren’t a tool for any media worker to achieve success. Mona Iraqi should be imprisoned for the sorrow she caused, in the same cell with the police officer who is bravely leading a campaign against LGBTs and presumed LGBTs.

Lt. Col. Ahmad Hashad, played by Fouad El Mohandes, prepares to put his expertise on immorality to use

Now what happens? That’s a good question. Three things: The first and most basic step is filing a complain against Mona Iraqi, Tamer Amin [a talk show host who has campaigned against “perverts” and dissenters of all kinds] – who seems to be the perfect match for her — and Ahmed Hashad (who is the head of the morals police and the officer responsible for the crackdown on homosexuals and transsexuals, according to his declarations).

Second: doing more extensive investigations on the lies behind all the homosexual and transsexual cases that Ahmed Hashad has presented to justice, and setting these victims of injustice free.

Last but not least, law needs to respect human rights, now not later. Police need to stop arresting people based on their sexualities or presumed sexualities, because that is just wrong and unjust. The law should be cleansed of all personal conservative beliefs about sexual activities.

It is about time for this country to start working according to law, and by law I mean a true law respectful of human rights that does not criminalize any consensual sexual activity by any means. Many people, LGBTs and non-LGBTs, wait for justice to take place. If you as a state do not apply justice, in time it will be applied to you.

Members of Egypt’s morality police, on hearing that immorality is taking place somewhere, are ready to go to work

“Yara” — she asked not to use her real name — is a transgender rights activist working on sexual health and rights. She wrote in Arabic; the translation was edited slightly for clarity in English. The original Arabic is at the end of this post.

Amid the latest events that Egypt is undergoing, causing changes on various levels, the issue of homosexuality has grabbed the attention of pens, papers and cameras of yellow newspapers.

To begin with, I am an Egyptian trans person from Egyptian roots. I carry no other passports and I belong to no political party or religious currents. And I am still living in Egypt. My case is the case of every homosexual living in Egypt, facing oppression on all levels, “a second class citizen” according to the criteria the society imposes on people for how they look or act. That fact won’t stop me from showing how disgusted I am by the crackdown on LGBT individuals in Egypt.

Let’s get to the point.

This is how 2014 started for me: four homosexuals were arrested in Nasr City and accused of “debauchery.” Three were sentenced to three years in prison, the other one to eight years.

Al Youm Al Sab’aa [the popular tabloid Youm7] played a major role in this case and other cases that followed, smearing the victims’ images and shaming their names by stalking them in the police stations to videotape them or take pictures of them, mentioning their full names in the newspaper in the name of “professionalism.”

Typical headline and photo from Youm7, spring 2014: “Crackdown on a network of shemales in Nasr City. Ahmed says, ‘I changed my name to Jana after being raped by the grocer and my psychologist. We get our clients from Facebook and we act like females by wearing makeup and adopting feminine attitudes. Are they going to put us in a men’s or women’s prison?” Photo caption: “Ahmed, the accused.” I blurred the face: Youm7 didn’t.

But obviously they didn’t figure in “the ethics of journalism.”

What are the ethics of journalism? Philosophies of media institutions might differ but they agree on the principles of following the truth, accuracy, subjectivity, neutrality, tolerance, and responsibility before the readers. To follow these ethics you start by collecting the information, understanding its importance, then delivering it to the audience.

The press is committed to the principle of “doing the least harm.” This means not publishing some details, such as the name of an injured person, or news irrelevant to the subject of the article that might harm the person mentioned. That definition of media ethics the journalists of Al Youm Al Sab’aa did not follow in any way, in any case they covered about homosexuality.

I will not talk for long about this newspaper that was so unethical in their news coverage.

Defendant in another “debauchery” case from 2014. Photo published in Elhadasnews.com. Again, I blurred the features, not the newspaper.

Along the same line: another disaster which was the first of its kind.

This was the campaign Mona Iraqi started against what she supposed, from her perspective, to be homosexuals. She started her campaign to know the reasons for the spread of AIDS in Egypt. Through her program she reported a number of people in a public place called “Bab Al Bahr” to the police, in order to protect them from the wrath of people living in that area — all according to the imagination of Mona Iraq.

Who am I and why am I speaking?

As I identified myself from the start as gay/trans, I also work in the field of health in Egypt and especially on HIV. I also work in human rights activism for LGBTs in Egypt.

Journalist Mona Iraqi, you talk about the acute criticism you faced from journalists in and outside Egypt, and human rights activists in and outside Egypt, in complete shock. You do not acknowledge the reasons behind this attack. So here are the reasons, based on your first and second episodes of the show “Al Mostakhbai” [Mona Iraqi’s television show]:

FIRST: The episode was supposed to be about AIDS and methods of transmission. But it was not. You did not discuss such questions as: What is HIV, and how is it different from AIDS; does it have symptoms or not; when do they show; what are the means of prevention; is there a cure or not?

The groups most at risk for the spread of HIV/AIDS are:

Injecting drug users;

Men having sex with men, and male and female sex workers;

People who have unsafe sex with either sex.

If Mona Iraqi, as she claims, seeks the reasons for the spread of AIDS in Egypt, why didn’t she seek out all the groups most at risk of getting HIV?

What about those eight individuals whom she interviewed outside the bath [about their homosexuality]? How are their private lives related to the content of the episode? What about their own HIV status? If the goal behind the episode is to reveal the “dens of AIDS,” why weren’t the arrestees checked for HIV while they were examined anally?

SECOND: In the first episode Mona Iraqi gave a speech about how it was impossible for her to enter this den full of naked men, as they were having group sex. But it is normal for her to record these men semi-naked on her phone! In her second episode she accused her critics of masculine bias, saying: “Are you attacking me because I’m a woman who did this?”

No activists objected to your being a woman among semi-naked men, but to your recording a video of them on your phone. However, if we look to the principles, values, traditions, and religious values that you and your supporters claim to apply in this case, then your being there and among these semi-naked men goes against all those values and traditions. It contradicts everything you previously said about those values.

THIRD: You demanded why activists and organizations in Egypt who are receiving funding don’t help this category of society.

The answer: this category is being prosecuted on all levels. We — activists — or anyone else cannot help directly. That doesn’t mean that we do not provide in one way or another — despite you.

CONCLUSION: Over one hundred persons were arrested and prosecuted in a few months, accused of debauchery, sentenced to between one year and twelve years in prison. The Egyptian yellow press and the likes of Mona Iraqi joined in smearing the image of the defendants and of homosexuals generally – in order to achieve fame, or sales.

The episodes of El Mostakhbai have nothing to do with HIV or AIDS or professionalism or press ethics.

Mona Iraqi referred to what is happening in European countries with arrests of male and female sex workers. But we do not see a picture of any journalist recording one of these arrests with his mobile phone. We didn’t hear about journalists reporting the places where they live.

What we can conclude from 2014 is that the issue of homosexuality in Egypt is a blown-up case pursued by those who want fame, or want to join in morally policing the lives and the privacy of many other people.

The December 7 bathhouse raid: Photo from Mona Iraqi’s Facebook page. Iraqi is on the right.

Covering their faces, shackled defendants in the bathhouse case are dragged into court, January 12: Photo by Reuters

It’s like watching a whole ramshackle building totter when a single brick is pulled out. That’s how it felt, a week after the government’s case against the 26 victims of Mona Iraqi’s bathhouse raid collapsed. Practically every day since, the Egyptian media has carried some new, damaging revelation about how the criminal-injustice system works.

1) The press headlined the allegation, first reported in BuzzFeed last week, that at least one of the 26 men was raped in detention, with the encouragement of the Azbekeya police station guards. Mohammed Zaki, one of the defense lawyers, said the cops offered the men – hauled from the bathhouse naked except for underwear or towels – “as a gift to the prisoners,” with one officer pushing the victim into a cell and telling inmates, “Today’s your lucky day. Enjoy.” The man was “stripped of his towel, pushed to the floor, and raped, while police ignored his cries for help.”

2) The independent daily Al Masry Al Youm posted a filmed interview with one of the 26 victims: “The police treated us like animals,” he said.

Ahmed, a young man in his thirties, comes to Cairo from his city in the Delta once or twice every week for a day trip of a few hours, to buy clothes on Clot Bey Street and return to the workshop in his city. On December 7, in his last visit to Cairo, Ahmed thought of going to one of the public bathhouses in the only district he knows. “The door of the place was open for anyone who wanted to cleanse himself,” says Ahmed. …

“Suddenly, the police raided the bathhouse and ordered us not to move. Some policeman started removing the towels we were putting on, while the TV host filmed those there,” Ahmed added. “When the owner of the bathhouse said she couldn’t film and asked who she was, she said she was from the government.” …

[At the Azbekeya station], a police assistant named Khaled put handcuffs on Ahmed and chained him to the iron gate of the jail and kept hitting him with a baton, and then shoved it in his behind. … Ahmed says the suspects were treated badly at the prosecution, but much worse in detention. “Despite the humiliation, no one [at the prosecution] ordered us to pretend we were dogs and bark, or lie on our stomachs while police officers passed by. It was like that every day in the jail.”

3) Al Masry Al Youm also interviewed neighbors of the bathhouse who condemned the raid as an “attempt to tarnish the area’s reputation.” One shop owner said, “Those are very good people. We and our ancestors had our shops next to that bathhouse and we have never seen anything wrong from them.”

4) Finally: Mona Iraqi herself may lose her show. A source inside the Al Kahera Wal Nas (Cairo and the People) TV channel said she faces cancellation, because she’s put her employers in “an awkward position.” It’s not just the ethical monstrosity she committed. It’s that the defendants’ lawyers are threatening libel suits against the channel for 10 million LE ($1.4 million US) each.

“She said she was from the government”: Mona Iraqi during her bathhouse broadcasts

In this one case, the regime and its lackeys are red-faced and in full retreat. That doesn’t mean, however, that the crackdown against LGBT people in Egypt is over. Remember:

Well over 100 people convicted for the “habitual practice of debauchery” since October 2013 still sit in prison.

Egypt’s prosecutor general has appealed the acquittal in this case, with a first hearing scheduled for January 26. The move shows a government still bent on putting LGBT people in prison. New arrests can start at any time.

What happens to Egyptians accused of being gay, or transgender, or lesbian is part of the overall human rights situation; and that is appalling. As the Revolution’s fourth anniversary impends, the counterrevolution is in charge. The government menaces human rights activists with possible life sentences. More than 25,000 alleged Muslim Brotherhood supporters languish in concentration camps without trial. My friend Yara Sallam and 23 others are serving two years behind bars for a peaceful protest march. Security forces persecute everyone from alleged “atheists” to street merchants. Until real rule of law restrains police power in Egypt, anybody different will be under threat.

Domestic and international pressure helped bring justice in the bathhouse case, but the work must continue — not just for LGBT Egyptians, but for all victims of human rights abuse. There are two important pressure points in coming months.

FIRST: The US gives over $1.5 billion in aid to Egypt annually. Nearly all is military assistance: economic aid makes up only around 15% of that total, and has been shrinking for more than a decade. No one in Egypt wants the remaining economic aid slashed – there’s no reason the rulers’ malfeasance should rob the poor of their last scraps and crumbs. But the military aid keeps the military dictatorship going. Cut it.

Since 2012, Senator Patrick Leahy has kept up the good fight to condition military aid on Egypt’s progress toward democracy. When the US Congress passed an appropriations bill last month, it included a long list of conditions: “holding free and fair elections, allowing peaceful assembly, due process for detainees.” But the law also “includes a waiver allowing Secretary of State John Kerry to ignore the preconditions for national security reasons.”

Leahy: Liberty for thee, as well as me

Will Kerry invoke the waiver, and keep the aid spigot on? The State Department is likely to start the internal debate next month. Powerful constituencies support Egypt. Foreign Military Financing (FMF) money must, by US law, be spent on US-made armaments. Egypt’s aid bonanza thus funnels back to the US defense industry, which slavers to keep the money flowing. Yet even if the US lacks political will to end its gifts to the generals completely, it could still show displeasure. It could stop offering Egypt two forms of undeserved special treatment: early disbursement and cash-flow financing.

“Early disbursement” of military aid is a privilege the US State Department gives only to Israel and Egypt. “At the beginning of the year, U.S. funding is deposited in an account at the New York Federal Reserve, and Cairo is allowed to use the interest accrued on these deposits to purchase additional equipment.” The interest gives it tens of millions extra to spend.

“Cash flow financing” is also a special privilege Egypt shares with Israel. It allows Cairo to purchase weapons even beyond its yearly aid allotment, using the promise of the money the US is due to give it in future years. Essentially, Egypt can buy on credit – and the US government is liable for any payments it fails to make. (Clearly, a special favor to the American weapons industry as well.) This accounting trick radically ramps up the Egyptian military’s purchasing power. In most years, Egypt contracts to buy over $2 billion in American arms. That’s about 50% more than what its actual American-aid budget should allow. Cash flow financing makes the difference.

The crackdown on LGBT Egyptians is only one human rights issue that should weigh against full military aid to a deeply dictatorial regime. But it should be weighed. Kerry should cut the gun-filled gift baskets — or, at the minimum, end the accounting legerdemain that augments Egypt’s largesse. And if he refuses, Leahy and Congress should make plenty of noise. The time to start pressing the State Department is now.

From Barack with love: American-bought F-16 jet over the pyramids. Photo from US Department of Defense, Defense Audiovisual Agency.

SECOND: On March 13-15, the regime will host an “Egypt Economic Development Conference” in the posh resort of Sharm el-Sheikh. President Sisi himself will launch the gathering. The meeting is central to Sisi’s strategy to resuscitate the economy. The idea is to get a group of powerful private investors together, and woo or cajol them to sink their money into Egypt. An array of infrastructure projects will be on offer; infrastructure is the core of Sisi’s revitalization plans. After all, the regime’s rich supporters – mostly the same well-connected crony capitalists who propped up Mubarak’s sclerotic rule – cluster in industries like cement, construction, and communications. “Economic growth” by and large means fattening their portfolios with pointless projects, not feeding the poor.

Sisi’s government has been promoting this summit for months. The figures keep flowing from the Ministry of Investment: 120 countries and 3,500 companies invited, 42 big investment projects up for grabs. Yet they’ve postponed the conference repeatedly, reflecting a lack of international enthusiasm over Egypt’s limp prospects. So they’ve hired not just global banking maven Lazard to rope in participants, but also the International Man of Mystery, Tony Blair.

President Sisi discusses Gaza, Israel, and business with Tony Blair, representative of the Quartet, on July 12, 2014. Just days earlier, news of Blair’s sinecure to “advise Sisi on economic reform” was leaked to the UK press. Photo by Reuters.

All that suggests the significance Sisi’s government hangs on the summit. The conference website is here; some speakers already are signed up — the chairs of GE and BP, and the head of the WPP Group, Britain’s mammoth advertising and media agency. I’ll be posting more about the meeting soon. All the participants should face one question back home: How will they use their leverage to improve Egypt’s dismal human rights record? And they might also be asked: How do they think their gay or lesbian or transgender employees in Egypt will fare? The time to pose these questions is now.

FINALLY: You want to know why all this is important? Don’t listen to me; listen to some of those whose lives the continuing crackdown wrecked.

I’ve interviewed two people arrested in two separate cases, when police raided private apartments in the spring of 2014. They were convicted, but appeals courts overturned their sentences – mainly because the original judges handed down verdicts even before sending the victims to the Forensic Medical Authority for anal tests.

A Beirut protester at a demonstration against forensic anal examinations in Lebanon, 2012: “Together against the tests of shame”

The anal tests are usually inflicted on all prisoners accused of homosexual conduct. They’re bogus, and an invasive form of torture – but at least they provide the spurious semblance of evidence. Yet in these cases the lower court judge didn’t need “proof”; one look at the defendants, who were mostly transgender, and he found them guilty. When they filed appeals, though, they endured the tests; and doctors declared them “unused.” (I think I know why. To find the victims “used” so long after the fact, the medics would need either to claim the exams can detect homosexual sex months later – which makes the test look even more absurd; or to admit sex takes place in Egyptian prisons, where the men had been kept since arrest.) Unlike most of the crackdown’s victims, they can tell their stories.

These are accounts of torture and sexual abuse; of judges who sentence people based on their looks alone; of transgender convicts trucked from prison to prison because the keepers wouldn’t take their “pervert” bodies. You’ll find Ahmed Hashad — who was also the arresting officer in the bathhouse case — watching while his victims are tortured. I’ve changed all names and left out identifying details.

1) “You don’t need a warrant for this type of people”

Nadia is a transgender woman in her early twenties. She’s had silicone implants in her breasts, and hopes someday to leave Egypt to have full gender reassignment surgery. She and three friends – two other trans-identified women and a cisgender man – moved into a new Cairo apartment. That very day, police raided it. They believe they weren’t targeted specifically: “The cops seemed to be doing a general search of apartments on that street. But as soon as they saw us they knew they had hit gold.”

It happened at noon. All four of us were in the apartment, two of us asleep, two of us awake. There was a knock on the door and when we opened it, four police broke into the apartment, with three informers. [By “informers,” she meant plainclothes as opposed to uniformed police.]

The head policeman asked: “Do you have girls, weed, weapons in the apartment?” We said no. He said, “I am going to search this place.” He found girls’ dresses and one wig. We asked why he didn’t have a warrant, and he said, “None of your business. Shut the fuck up, bitches.” An informer said to the officer: “See how they look, they are all khawalat” [faggots]. The officer said: “You don’t need a warrant for this type of people.”

Egypt’s finest: Central Security forces march along Mohamed Mahmoud Street in central cairo, under graffiti reading “Glory to the Unknown,” November 19, 2014. Photo by Amr Abdallah Dalsh for Reuters

They took us to the police station … They started hitting us in the face and kicking our legs, and touching us all over. The informers kept trying to pull my hair out. “Are these prostitutes?” the officer in charge said, and the other police said, “No, they are khawalat.” He said, “In more than 24 years I have never seen khawalat so effeminate. Take off your clothes. “

They took the phone of Laila [one of the roommates] and showed us photos of trans people on it. “Do you know these?” they demanded. I said all the pics were of people outside Egypt. They asked, “Do you get fucked? Are there many people like you?” …

Another officer, when he was told we were khawalat, starting beating us violently. Laila infuriated them by not saying anything, so they hit her especially. A “nice” clerk came and said, “They are sick people and you shouldn’t hit them.” Then he started taking a video of us.

They started to write up a report. We denied being khawalat. I said, “Is every person who has long hair a khawal? You can’t judge us by labels. If we are khawalat, you would have caught us in the act.” But they said, “It’s already in the report that you were caught in the act.” I claimed that we were sexually frigid and we could not have sex. But the officers and the informers all said, “If you look like this, you are doing that.”

They put us in a small cell away from the regular detention area. The officers began sexually abusing us, grabbing our breasts. One of the informers said, “If you don’t sleep with me, I’ll put you in detention with the other prisoners.” …

Learning the ropes, and chains: Students at Egypt’s police academy. Photo from AlRaiPress.com.

The next day we went to the niyaba [prosecutor]. We got four days’ detention, and went back to the police station, and then they took us back to the niyaba again. At the niyaba a lawyer told us the police claimed they had been watching us for a week. But we had just taken the contract for the apartment the day we were arrested! The wakil niyaba [deputy prosecutor] told us, “Call the Perverts’ Human Rights Association and they will get you out.” And there was a journalist taking pictures of us at the niyaba. One of the informers took the woman and took the phone and downloaded things from it, and told her to get the fuck out: he said the wakil niyaba prohibited taking photographs. But the guard there didn’t care, he said, “Fuck you and your wakil niyaba.”

Defendant in another “debauchery” case from 2014. Photo published in Elhadasnews.com. I blurred the features; the newspaper didn’t.

Just six days after we were arrested, they took us before a judge. A journalist took our pictures again at the court. The judge called us names and didn’t even look at us. Three of us got three years in prison, and the one whose name was on the rental contract got eight.

On the second day after that we were sent to prison.

In the van to the prison, the officers kept telling us we would be beaten and raped. … At the prison entrance, the guards shouted, “Where the hell do these come from? They can’t be in this place. You can’t put such cases in this institution!”

The father of one of the victims “was an officer in the police. And the prison guy became more polite when he learned this. We asked to be put away from the other people in prison, and he said he would. He was the prison commandant.”

The guards went past all the cells saying, “Now you have women in the prison.” But we were put in an isolation cell for highly dangerous people.

Then because there was an appeal being made for us, we were taken to the Estinaf [appeals] prison … We were all four put together in one cell there, though one guard went to the straight-looking guy among us and said, “You are not a khawal, what are you doing here?”

No pinkwashing these walls: Wadi Natroun prison in the Delta, from ElSaba7.com

After a few months they sent us to another prison. It rejected us. When we entered, guards beat us and told us to take off our clothes. “Open up your ass! What’s in there?” They got us naked and made the whole prison watch us. … The guard took off my T-shirt and looked at my breasts and said, “What is this? I am responsible for this prison!” He said to the commandant, “They sent us monkeys!”

There, we were separated, one to a cell. “Because they are sick,” the commandant explained, “And I don’t know how to treat them, I can’t have them in this prison.” He tried to transfer us to Tora Hospital [at the main military prison complex outside Cairo]. …

There was a lot of sexual harassment. People taking off our clothes. There was only soft sex, though. No one penetrated us. In prison, they had cameras everywhere – but no one cared.

They were sent back to the appeals prison.

A doctor in the prison kept asking us, “Are you a pervert? Do you sleep with men?” We said no. “Do you have erections?” No. He wrote a false report and said we asked for sex reassignment surgery. He told us, “If we give you the surgery we can put you in a women’s prison.” I said, “Are you crazy? I will not do this in prison!”

We were sent to the Forensic Medical Authority. They had forgotten to do this at the first trial because they were in such a hurry to convict us! The trial judge should have asked for the Forensic Medical Authority result, but he didn’t want to because there was press there, and he wanted to give the sentence quickly.

We went three times to the Forensic Medical Authority in Ramsis [the Cairo neighborhood near the main train station]. But each time, the police didn’t bring an order from the niyaba to do the test, so they wouldn’t do it. So the appeals judge kept postponing the decision – for one month, then another month, then for three months. Basically, he and the niyaba and the police wanted to keep us in prison, not let us out. It was 40 days after the niyaba asked for it that they finally did it. Even the doctor was astonished. …

And the anal test happened five months after our arrest. The doctor said: “You are fucking each other,” even before the test started. We said no, and told him the whole thing. Then: ”Take off your clothes: kneel over the chair and hug it.” He pushed our butt cheeks aside and looked. The report found us all unused.

The Forensic Medical Authority also did a report on our breasts, because the niyaba wanted it! They didn’t know I had silicone boobs; they asked me if I had taken an XY [chromosome] test. I lied, I said “Yes, these breasts are normal.“ They didn’t know the difference.

Whenever we went back to the niyaba, the wakil niyaba kept interrogating us about many different subjects. He tried to accuse us of having sex in the prison, and when we denied it, he told us, “That’s what they are saying about you. I don’t care about your case, I just care about you having sex in the prison.”

He demanded, “Why are you being rejected by every prison? Do you have vaginas? And he told us a story that really upset him: “One month ago, we caught some khawalat from Italy, she-males [in English] on a boat in the Nile. And public opinion approved of that, but Italy interfered, and they got them out.”

Finally, the appeals court acquitted them, after more than six months in prison. They’ve moved to a different city, but they still fear that police may find them and jail them on some new pretext. “I want to get out of this country,” Nadia told me. “I can’t go through that hell ever again.”

Victims of the bathhouse raid, in a screenshot from Mona Iraqi’s television show: From Al Masry Al Youm

2) “Look at the faggots in the cage”

Mazen is also in his early twenties. He is a top, and straight-acting. A couple of years ago, he says, “I met some guys from downtown, and one thing led to another, and I admitted to myself that I am gay. Some of these friends told me I should do it in business.” He became a part-time sex worker, and he teamed up with some “she-males and ladyboys” (words he uses in English). “In their case, they simply couldn’t find any other kind of work.”

“We were in our apartment. I lived there with Manar and Hala” –who identify as transgender, though Mazen mostly uses male pronouns for them. Two male friends were visiting that evening, one more “effeminate” than the other, Mazen says. “One of them was not in business, the other one does business from time to time.”

There’s a website for she-males specifically; and Hala had her picture on there with her mobile number. So this man called Hala on her phone and asked for a meeting. But she didn’t accept; she was afraid he was an officer. She was sticking to regular customers because of the arrests—she was afraid the new person would be an informer or an officer or something.

Then after she refused, he called Manar, my lover. Manar showed Hala the number, and talked her into trusting him. And so he came over. And it turned out that man actually was an undercover officer.

When I came in, the man was already in the apartment. I went upstairs to the balcony and sat there watching if anyone else was coming – any police – while the man sat inside with the others. He said he some alcohol in the car and he went downstairs to get it. But we watched and noticed he was calling someone while the car was still running, and he stayed talking about then minutes. Then he came back up, but he said he was going to the bathroom, while holding his mobile phone, and there he talked over the phone some more.

I was on the balcony, checking the area, and the two guys came up and asked, “Is there anything going on?” And then suddenly, two cars came in fast and stopped directly in front of the building.

We knew immediately it was police. Manar went to the bedroom and changed out of women’s clothes. Hala was just frozen. I went to the door to run … The policemen were on the stairs – two officers and a bunch of plainclothes. … Hala went down the stairs and tried to get past them. I went up the stairs. There was a window in the staircase and from it I shimmied down the pipes to the street.

But the officers caught them all.

Policemen kick and beat a suspect. Photo from the blog TortureInEgypt.net

It was a big operation. Ahmed Hashad, the intelligence director of the Adab [Morals] police, was there, and he was telling the neighbors, “Don’t worry, we are just arresting the she-males of Egypt.” They had two private cars, plus a car like a box for the transport, and a microbus. … Hala was the only one of us wearing women’s clothes, baby doll clothes [Egyptians often use the English expression “baby doll” for skimpy women’s outfits] ….

One of the policemen beat me, and took all my money and two mobiles. There were four laptops in the apartment, two new and two older. The two new ones and my mobiles, the officers took them and shared them out for their own. In the police report they only mentioned the older laptops. In the bag that the officer had used to bring the alcohol, they put some of the baby doll clothes, as evidence.

They took us to the Mugamma el-Tahrir [the huge government building in central Cairo], to the department of Adab. There, three officers beat us, while Ahmed Hashad watched them … They were hitting us on the back of the head, and beating me and kicking me on my legs, and they stomped on my foot and injured it.

The massive Mugamma adminstration building in Midan Tahrir: Photo from Wikipedia

They tried to recruit Hala to help them: Was there any meeting place for she-males? They said if she told them they’d let her out. She said she didn’t know. Manar was wearing men’s clothes; they told him to take them off, and he refused, so they started to light cigarettes and burn his body with them. They got a baby doll dress and made him wear it.

They wrote a report but none of us was talking while they did it – the police wrote the report themselves. They took a photo of all five of us, and they made us sit in a part of the office where there’s no roof, and it was freezing – the weather was cold. They called us names, shouting “khawal” and asking, “What is wrong with you?” …

At 9 or 9:30 AM, they took us out of the Mugamma to go to the niyaba. The square was crowded and while we were walking, an officer hit Hala and she screamed. And everyone was pointing and looking at us and gossiping.

When we entered the office of the wakil niyaba, he started shouting, “You are the khawalat! Why are you doing this?” and so on, with foul language. He wasn’t questioning us, just cursing. ….

Another wakil niyaba interrogated me and the other guy. He started calling the other guy a khawal. The guy denied it, trying to defend himself. But the wakil kept insisting, “Yes, you are a khawal, because you look like one.” And he checked his mobile for messages that could convict him, and checked the pictures on my laptop. ….

The scandal site Youm7 published a photo of Hala in women’s clothes, showing her face clearly. Police or prosecutors had leaked it to the paper. Meanwhile, the prosecutor charged them with “debauchery.” Though they were engaged in sex work, that was legally irrelevant: the provision punishes men who have sex with men regardless of whether money was exchanged.

They brought men’s clothes for Hala and Manar and then they took us to the police station in [our neighborhood], which had jurisdiction over the apartment. … At the police station they put me and the other guy in cells with other prisoners. His had maybe 85 prisoners, and mine only 75. But Hala and Manar and the other one of us were put in a cage “for observation,” next to the visitors’ entrance. And they put them there partly because if they were in a cell with other prisoners, they would be raped or tortured. But also, the cage was directly by the front door: so whenever someone was entering or going out, the police would point and say, “Look at the khawalat in the cage.” They were zoo animals on display.

A defendant in another “debauchery” case from 2014: Photo from Alamatonline.net

The parents of the guy in the crowded cell paid bribes to get him moved to another cell, for people convicted of stealing public money. It was for 23 people only and was stylish[in English]. My mother pulled some connections and got me moved there too. We told the prisoners we were there because of hash dealing and a fight, so no one bothered us. …

We saw a judge four days after the arrest. We had six lawyers and they were good lawyers but they hadn’t even been shown the court papers. After a week’s delay the court met again … The police reports were all lies. They said that four of us were having sex in pairs when the police came in, two in each room, and I was the one who opened the door. They said we were caught in the act. They didn’t mention the undercover officer at all. The lawyer argued this was ridiculous: “Even if they were having sex, they would have gotten scared and stopped when the police knocked on the door.” The judge took a break for a bit to read the statements. Then he returned and said the verdict. Manar got 12 years; Hala and the more effeminate of the guys got I think 7 years; I got 4 years.

Eight men convicted in the “gay wedding” video trial leave the courtroom cage, November 1, 2014.

In the reasons for the verdict, the judge mentioned some stuff from the Qur’an about men who resemble women. The lawyers and our parents were shocked; no one expected this. They took us to the waiting room. Manar wasn’t able to move or speak, Hala was crying … For 15 minutes I was thanking God that no more than this had happened; then I turned hysterical. I started screaming and shouting, I don’t even remember …

We went back to the police station. The officers were saying, “You deserve it.”

The appeals process started. They hadn’t given us the forensic medical examination before the first trial … So this time we were sent to the Forensic Medical Authority.

They were found “unused.”

After that, the only evidence left was three guys wearing feminine clothes, and the pictures they got from the Internet or from our mobiles. The lawyer blamed them on photoshop – he said, “You can manufacture whatever you want.” By the time of the hearing, my beard was fully grown. The judge asked the wakil niyaba, “How can you present a girl’s picture and claim it is this guy?”

At the final hearing, the judge “wrote on the case that we were innocent. And he closed the case file and threw it at us, and told us, ‘You are innocent, you khawalat.’”

We spent seven months in prison, total. We were so happy when we walked out. But Manar and Hala are in terrible shape still. They can’t work in any normal job because of the way they look. And they can’t work in business because they are so afraid.

Courtroom chaos when the verdict in the bathhouse case is announced, January 12, 2015: Photo from Yaablady.com.

UPDATE:The Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights tells me (and the newspaper Al Wafd reports tonight) that the prosecution has formally appealed the not-guilty verdict against the 26 men. The prosecution has the right to appeal twice, under Egyptian law — once to an appeals court, and after that to the Court of Cassation. We don’t know whether the appeal will be accepted and a new trial held. Our understanding is that the law requires the existing verdict to be implemented pending the appeal — that is, the men should be freed. But the police will very likely try to find some pretext to keep them detained. What this shows is that the state is still hellbent on persecuting these men to the limits of its power.

Families and friends celebrate the acquittal of 26 men in the Cairo bathhouse raid trial, January 12, 2015. Photo: Louisa Loveluck on Twitter, @leloveluck

“This court finds the defendants innocent ….” That, or more or less that, was all anybody heard the judge say. The courtroom exploded. Lawyers cheered; journalists stood on the benches and joined the cheering; and the families, manhandled outside by the bailiffs before the hearing began, forced their way in through the doors and shoved the policemen aside in return: brothers and fathers shouting to the cameras that their kids were vindicated, black-clad women trilling the zaghrata — the triumphal ululation heard at weddings. It spilled into the halls outside. At one point the families and a few friends stood fists pumping in a circle, chanting “Our sons are men!” And there were cries of “Put Mona Iraqi on trial!” I’ve never seen anything quite like this in attending countless Egyptian trials over the years. We’d never felt anything like this. No one expected it. No one was prepared.

I didn’t bring a camera. Louisa Loveluck, of the Daily Telegraph, has posted a few seconds’ footage of the jubilation:

You have to understand: acquittals happen rarely in Egypt; when they do it’s generally because of an appeals judge who cares about the rule of evidence, certainly not at the first instance. This is the only high-profile human rights case since the 2013 coup that ended with such a success. Egyptian activists who worked on this case, documented it, and helped mobilize journalists and intellectuals and other activists to express their horror at what Mona Iraqi did — they deserve credit for this. I don’t know exactly what motivated the judge to look at the facts and not the headlines: whether he cared about the public pressure or about his own reputation (at the last session, he called the journalists to the bench to ask why they were so interested in this case) or whether he got a message from above that the state was ready to back down. But it wouldn’t have happened without ordinary people, gay and straight, from the families themselves to bloggers to tens of thousands of folks on Facebook and other social media, in Egypt and abroad, who had the courage and energy to speak out.

Alf mabrouk.

Families of defendants rejoice in the courtroom. Photo: Associated Press.

There’s more to be done. The crackdown must end. I hope this sends a message to the police that judges will no longer rubber-stamp their concocted cases, but the pressure on them needs to keep up. Other journalists need a reminder that the opprobrium Mona Iraqi met can extend to them if they continue their collusion with the surveillance state. Some lawyers are talking about pressing a case against Ahmed Heshad, the arresting officer from the morals police; for faking his testimony in the police report, and for his illegal leaking of information to Mona Iraqi. (Lester Feder of BuzzFeed, who was there with us today, covers the police misconduct in his excellent account of the trial, written with Maged Atef.) Others want to sue Mona Iraqi herself. (Mona is reportedly in Paris this week, having taken a convenient vacation while the consequences of her acts play out.) I’ll write more later today about why this story isn’t over.

Meanwhile, though: the joy left me dazed. I was full of memories. I first came to Egypt in November 2001, for the last session of the Queen Boat trial. When that chaotic, overwhelming hearing ended, a few of us — including Maher Sabry and Hossam Bahgat, both of whom had worked hard to spread the story of the arrests to the world — went to the old Horeya cafe in downtown Cairo. The place was founded in 1937; its name means “Freedom”; every revolution the city has seen was, in some measure, planned there. We drank Stella beer in the slanted late-afternoon light, and felt unsure of how to feel; half the defendants had been convicted, half acquitted. Another colleague frantically worked her phone, trying to find someone to buy her earrings. She needed the money because, though her friend in the case had been found innocent, he faced several days of being trucked from police station to police station in Cairo, while the cops checked whether he had any other charges pending. She wanted cash to pay enough bribes to spare him the ordeal. We didn’t know then that this was only the beginning of a crackdown that, over the next three hellish years, would see hundreds more jailed.

Egyptian justice hasn’t changed — it’s still unjust. The courts are still chaos, these men’s lives are still wrecked. Yet there’s a bit of hope. Today we went to the Nadwa cafe, around the corner from Horreya, and sat in the canted winter light and tried to collect our thoughts, which were scattered around like dreck and cracked sunflower seeds. I don’t like selfies much, but here’s one we took, with me and Dalia Abd El Hameed of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, and Ramy Youssef, a law student and human rights activist, both of whom have been fighting this crackdown from the start.

They’re only two of the many people who labored to see this victory, without expecting it. We look really happy. I hope lots of others today are feeling happy too.

Shnit, the Swiss-based international short film festival, posted this on its website today:

As of its annual Council meeting on December 22th in Bern, the Board of Trustees of the shnit FOUNDATION, in accordance with Festival Director, has decided to exclute Mona Iraqi from the shnit International Shortfilmfestival immediately. shnit International Shortfilmfestival completely distance from and condemn the practices – professional and ethical – employed by Mona Iraqi as a TV reporter in the events of December 7th in Cairo. These practices are at utter odds with the principles of the shnit International Shortfilmfestival.
The Board of Trustees believes it is of great importance, however, to continue the shnit PLAYGROUND in Cairo, under new management and in line with the values of respect, tolerance and artistic expression without prejudice for which shnit has always stood. Commitment to these principles is a foundation of each and every PLAYGROUND and shnit’s management team around the world.

We thank again those who brought the issue to our attention, and to those who allowed us the due process to make an informed and considered decision.

Kudos to Shnit for doing the right thing, and rejecting Iraqi’s excuses and lies. Thanks also to all the people, in Egypt and beyond, who wrote to Shnit to complain about Iraqi’s unethical and immoral participation in gross human rights abuses.

Meanwhile, her victims are still in jail. It’s imperative to keep up the pressure on Iraqi. She has no place on the international cultural or journalistic scenes until the men she imprisoned are freed; until she apologizes for her role in this disaster and for her misrepresentations; and until the mass arrests targeting gay and transgender people in Egypt, which she’s done so much to further, stop.

Tomorrow, December 21, is the first hearing in the trial of men arrested in Mona Iraqi’s December 7 bathhouse raid in Cairo. I will post updates here. Meanwhile: Protest this horrendous human rights abuse. Some very brave Egyptian activists are calling for a campaign on Twitter and social media — starting tomorrow, but continuing after. You can tweet using the hashtag #مخبر_اعلامي : in English, #StopInformerJournalists. You can also copy in @Mona_Iraqi and @MonaIraqiTV. The event page is here, and the call to action is below, in Arabic and then English:

Contributions will be made through all social media to protest Mona Iraqi’s unethical cooperation with oppressive police forces, which led to the largest crackdown on people based on their assumed sexual orientations in recent Egyptian history. Not only did she lead the police in arresting 26 people — men kept naked while she filmed them using her camera phone like a bounty hunter – she covered her tracks with a media campaign spreading the idea that this is about HIV and prostitution. We protest the real perversion practiced by Mona Iraqi and her like. We protest the journalists who become informers rather than neutral transmitters of fact. We protest the state brutality and extreme injustice against people suspected of being gay or transgender in Egypt.

How can I contribute?

On that day, here’s what we will do. Go to any of your social media — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or your own blog. Write a post or share a picture that expresses your opinions on the matter. Attach it with this hashtag: #المخبرـالإعلامي

ACTION: Please write to Shnit and Olivier van der Hoeven in protest at the film festival’s decision to support homophobic informer Mona Iraqi:foundation@shnit.org

The International Short Film Festival is based, along with its director, Olivier van der Hoeven, in the placid Swiss capital of Bern. The festival has branches or “playgrounds” in Argentina, El Salvador, Japan, Russia, South Africa, and Thailand. Oh, and Cairo, Egypt. The festival goes by “Shnit” for short, a semi-acronym ugly but calculated to grab attention. As director of its Cairo playground, Shnit chose someone also skilled at doing ugly things that grab attention. Shnit’s Egypt representative is the infamous TV presenter, gay hunter, homophobe, and police informer Mona Iraqi.

Pink in some places, not in others: Olivier de Hoeven, director of Shnit

A splendid French blogger discovered this four days ago. But let’s be fair: Shnit chose Mona Iraqi before her full penchant for depredations was known. She only revealed herself wholly last weekend, when — doing her bit for a massive government crackdown on Egypt’s LGBT communities — she led a police raid on a Cairo bathhouse. 25 or more men — beaten and bound, paraded naked and humiliated into the cold night, their faces shown on Mona’s own Facebook page — now face charges of homosexual conduct as a result of Iraqi’s work, with prison terms of up to three years. Since then, she’s been boasting about this for a domestic audience, and lying about it for a foreign one. This poses PR problems for an international cultural klatsch like Shnit, which — as its name shows — has an fine ear for publicity. They’ve had a week to decide: how do they deal with their wayward Egypt employee?

By lying. Amazingly, Shnit hasn’t distanced itself from Mona Iraqi’s collusion with Cairo’s gay-chasing, torturing police. They endorse what she did while parroting her deceptions. That’s disgraceful. Shnit owes LGBT people, in Egypt and around the world, an apology; they owe one to Egypt’s whole embattled human rights community. And, for the sake of their reputation, they need to scrub Mona Iraqi from their credits now.

The first thing Shnit did post-debacle was to change its website to cover its tracks. Now, when you open the site, you get this:

So very pro-queer! The ad’s for a Dutch movie about a trans* teenager. You might get the impression from the context that it has shown in Shnit’s Cairo festival. That’s misrepresentation number one: So far as I can make out, it never has.

The context is what counts here, and it’s all about justifying what Mona Iraqi did. When you click on the image, you get some boilerplate:

Shnit International Shortfilmfestival has a proud, long-standing history of support and inclusion of films, filmmakers and audiences of all sexual orientations, of all races and walks of life, from every corner of the world. We strongly believe in freedom of lifestyle and expression.

This is complete bullShnit, and surely Olivier van der Hoeven knows it. Mona Iraqi wasn’t looking for evidence of “sex trafficking” — which is not, of course, the same thing as “sex trade for money” — nor did she find any. She was looking for evidence of homosexual conduct, because the police have been arresting alleged gay and trans people by the dozens or hundreds for a year now. (Olivier van der Hoeven can read about that here and here.) The men are being charged under an Egyptian law against men having sex with men; the provision says nothing about the exchange of money. (Olivier van der Hoeven can read about that law here.) Mona Iraqi collaborated with Cairo’s gay-hunting cops in planning and executing the raid: a perfect paradigm of what indignant Egyptians call “informer journalism.” Iraqi wrote on her Facebook page the day after the raid (complaints later got the post taken down):

Today is a beautiful day … Our program was able to break up a place for perversion between men and to catch them flagrantly in the act … My God, the result is beautiful.

As for filming “to ensure the police act in accordance with the humanitarian standards” — this makes me so sick I can barely breathe. If Mona Iraqi cared about “humanitarian standards” she would protest how police led the men stripped onto the street, humiliated and degraded, or about the forensic anal exams — a form of torture, repeatedly condemned by Human Rights Watch and other rights groups — that the victims have been forced to endure. About those grotesque abuses, the “humanitarian” Mona Iraqi hasn’t uttered a sound.

Neither will Shnit. In regurgitating Mona Iraqi’s hypocritical lies, Shnit and de Hoeven excuse or deny homophobia, prison terms, police brutality, and torture. On the other hand, Mona Iraqi’s footage of the raid should make an exciting short film. Shnit can rake in dollars showing it in Cape Town, Bangkok, Buenos Aires, or Bern.

Mona Iraq (R) making a short film about police acting in accordance with humanitarian standards, December 7, 2014

Iraqi’s allusions to “sex trafficking” are simply a stab at explaining away these horrors. (If the men are victims of trafficking, why are they facing three years in prison?) She and Shnit evidently share the certainty that sex workers have no human rights. That parallels Iraqi’s mortifying invocation of HIV/AIDS as a reason for the raid. The arrests she supervised, Iraqi told the Egyptian press, “confirm the strong relationship between the spread of AIDS and sexual practices between men.” She was actually saving lives for World AIDS Day, she insists. These fictions only further the transmission of HIV/AIDS: by increasing the stigma attached to men who have sex with men, by driving vulnerable communities further underground, by furnishing heterosexual partners a false feeling of safety. In giving Iraqi’s deceptions a free pass, Shnit deals a further and disgusting insult to Egyptians actually trying to combat the pandemic.

I tried to give Tarasova and Shnit the benefit of the doubt: maybe they actually didn’t know that any sex between men is an “unlawful action” in Egypt, or that a police crackdown has been expanding for a year. I wrote:

Georges Azzi, distinguished Lebanese activist and head of the Arab Foundation for Freedoms and Equality, weighed in:

But Tarasova insisted that she knew better than people in the region.

It was, she said, just “words against words.”

The rainbow flag always makes everything better.

Ekaterina Tarasova’s job with Shnit is “research,” and I think she could use some lessons on how to do it. You might also suppose that, at some point, a staffer in a sensitive situation like this would decide the better part of valor was to shut up. But not Shnit, and not Tarasova. The thing is, they truly love Mona Iraqi. They’re truly eager to defend her against any and all evidence. And her victims, rotting in a Cairo jail, can go to hell — except they’re already in it.

Once again: you can write to Shnit at foundation@shnit.org. They surely should explain how they square their support for Mona Iraqi’s police raid with their supposed endorsement of equality; how their equanimity about jailing gay men (or torturing supposed victims of “trafficking,” for that matter) fits with their pieties about human rights. The arts aren’t there to make torture and hate honored guests at a champagne reception. As one activist put it:

Activists condemn TV presenter Mona Iraqi, who reported a group of men and filmed them while they were being arrested: and demand that the Egyptian government cease persecuting people for their sexual practices

The undersigned groups have followed with much shock and increasing worry the arrest, by Egyptian morality police of the Cairo Security Directorate, of approximately 26 individuals while at a public bathhouse for men in the Ramsis neighbourhood. The men were arrested for the alleged “group practice of deviance” in exchange for money inside the bathhouse. This incident happened after the bathhouse was reported to police by media presenter Mona Iraqi, who claimed that the men turned the place into a “den of group deviance.” Iraqi did not stop at reporting these men: she actually accompanied the police force while they stormed the place, at around 10 PM on Sunday, December 7. She photographed groups of men inside the bathhouse while police gathered them naked, denying them the right to put on their clothes. The men desperately tried to conceal their identities, but they were filmed and photographed in clear infringement of their privacy rights and in obvious disregard to the law.

This incident is the continuation of a vicious security campaign launched by the state, carried out by its morals police, against gay and transgender people. The incident is the largest mass arrest of individuals arrested on the charge of practising “debauchery” since the notorious raid on the Queen Boat in 2001. It was preceded by dozens of other arrests of gay and transgender people, or people suspected of being so. After June 30, 2013, activists have documented the arrest of more than 150 individuals on the assumption that they are gay or transgender. In some cases prison sentences of eight or nine years have been imposed, on legal grounds that are incorrect or fabricated. The arrests have been accompanied by a still more monstrous media crusade, publicizing the personal information of those arrested, publishing their pictures, even posting filmed interviews with them. The media present homosexuals as a group of “sick” individuals and criminals in need of therapy — or paints them as a deviant community that spread after the revolution.

The media crusade has not stopped at that. Mona Iraqi took the media frenzy to a new level as she transformed the job of a presenter to that of an informant, working for the police, reporting to them what she thinks is a crime. Those who were arrested did not commit any crime punishable by law. Yet various media outlets promoted the idea that the biggest sex ring in Egypt for “practising deviance “ had been arrested, before any verdict was reached or any accusation against those individuals was actually proven. Iraqi boasted about her reporting, calling it a heroic deed and a “moral triumph.” She took pictures of those arrested, in clear violation of the basic ethics of journalism. The signatories to this statement condemn most strongly what this media presenter did. Her acts disgrace the professions of media and journalism. We assert that the person who violated the law is the presenter and not the men who were arrested.

Besides prying into people’s intentions and their private, consensual practices, this presenter clearly violated articles 75 and 58 of the law of criminal procedures: these prohibit anyone from disseminating information about persons arrested by the police to others who do not have standing in the case. We demand that the presenter, Mona Iraqi, be held accountable before the law for misusing her profession to violate the privacy of others and slander and misrepresent them, and for pursuing professional benefit regardless of consequences.

The groups and organizations signed below profess their deep distress that the spread of the human immunodeficiency virus (AIDS) has been used to justify and legitimate these demeaning media practices. These reports have done nothing but increase stigma and discrimination against the groups most vulnerable to the virus. Ultimately this will damage their opportunities to seek counselling services or voluntary testing and therapy.

In conclusion, the undersigned organizations affirm that the state has to end its prosecution of personal behaviour, its pursuit of individuals both into their bed rooms and in public spaces, and its spying on them and their means of communication. The organizations also stress the responsibility of the state to protect and realize the rights of these individuals, including their rights to privacy, and to freedom from stigma and slander.

Update: There are now several petitions you can sign to support Hopper and Vance. If you have an academic affiliation, go here — there are petitions on behalf of both scholars. If you are an activist or advocate, you can sign a petition for Vance here.

Columbia University is rich. This was brought home to me many years ago, the first time that — a kid from the countryside — I visited Rockefeller Center. As I walked through the marmoreal plazas of that temple of capitalism, someone, I forget who, pointed out that the Rockefellers didn’t actually own the land the skyscrapers were built on. Columbia University did, and rented it to Nelson, David, et.al. This astonished me. I thought of universities as assemblies of disinterested, impecunious intellectuals; it was like hearing that Keats personally built the British Museum, or that Van Gogh paid for his life of luxury by hiring out the Louvre. In fact, Columbia, a canny cross between Scrooge and Thomas Sutpen, has made a fortune by speculating in land. It moved its quarters uptown in 1896, building a formidable campus at what was then virtually the northern edge of settlement; its colonial relations with impoverished neighbors, a sorry record of exploitation and expropriation, led its own students to riot in 1968. But it clung to its midtown holdings, raked in the rent, and finally sold them to Rockefeller Center in 1985 for a tidy $400 million. It’s still growing like a sci-fi movie fungus, planning a whole vast new campus on 17 acres that used to be part of Harlem. Among US universities, its endowment of $8.1 billion puts it behind only Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford and (get this) Texas A&M and the University of Texas; but that’s greater than the GDPs of, among others, the Bahamas, Haiti, Malawi, Moldova, Montenegro, and Tajikistan. American universities are unprecedented entities in the world: huge concentrations of power and money, economies in themselves, ostensibly devoted to free thought but despotically run as any petrostate, and virtually immune to protest since the scruffy ’68 generation moved on to practice corporate law.

Someday, son, all this will be yours, plus most of the surrounding neighborhoods: Aerial view of Columbia’s main campus

It’s worth remembering this while reflecting on the fact that Columbia just fired two of the most important public intellectuals working in the fields of health and human rights. Carole Vance and Kim Hopper had been professors at the Mailman School of Public Health for decades — 27 and 26 years, respectively. Vance, The Nation rightly says, has done “pioneering work on the intersection of gender, health and human rights”; Hopper “is both an advocate for the homeless and one of the nation’s foremost scholars on homelessness.” They were fired not because of any shortcomings in their research or teaching, but because they hadn’t raised enough money.

In an excellent article, The Nation expands on the Darwinian economics behind this move, and I can’t do better than quote them:

Like many schools of public health, Mailman operates on a “soft money” model, which means that professors are expected to fund much of their salaries through grants. (Many professors there, including Vance and Hopper, work without tenure.) Recently, the amount expected has increased—from somewhere between 40 and 70 percent of their salaries to as much as 80 percent …. Meanwhile, the [US government’s] National Institutes of Health, the primary source of grant money, has seen its budget slashed. These days, only 17 percent of grant applications are successful—a record low.

Vance told the Columbia Spectator that “requiring faculty members to fund 80% of their salaries through external grants is unbelievable at an educational institution.” As The Nation points out, “Legally, professors who are 80 percent grant-supported have to spend 80 percent of their total workweek on grant-related research.” This means, says Vance, “that only 20% of faculty time is available for teaching, mentoring, and advising.” It’s even worse, in fact; you have to deduct the time spent hustling to corral the funds, because those grants don’t raise themselves.

Students of the Mailman School at a meeting to protest the firings: Photo by Ayelet Pearl for Columbia Spectator

Students at the School of Public Health have protested vigorously; they donned T-shirts reading “Un-Occupy Mailman,” because funders have taken over the school’s priorities. A representative of the Dean responded in bureaucratese: “Public health depends on soliciting feedback from all stakeholders.” (References to multiple “stakeholders” always mean: You to whom I am speaking will get screwed.) “That is why Dean Fried invited doctoral students to share their concerns — concerns we all have — about the importance of maintaining the high quality of a Mailman education in the face of reduced federal support.” And further blather.

Carole Vance is a friend of mine. I’m well aware that when bad things happen to people, their friends often respond with public praise that is entirely merited but doesn’t really change things. The victims may end up with the sense that they are reading their own obituaries in advance, which may be pleasing but is hardly encouraging. There is nothing retrospective about Carole, and I will try to avoid this note of plangency.

Still, you can’t fail to note that Vance has been a major force in US and international feminism at least since the 1980s, when she co-organized the famous 1982 Barnard Conference on Sexuality, and compiled many of the resultant papers into the landmark anthology Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality.These days, when people talk about the Sex Wars they may think either of Uganda or of something to do with Sandra Fluke; then, though, it meant an impassioned contest over how feminism would cope with the unregulatable reality of multifarious sexual desires. Carole’s groundbreaking work for thirty years has carried forward the message that both feminism and human rights practice have to integrate sexuality as a central human concern.

I first got to know Carole about fifteen years ago, when, with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, she organized a program to bring both activists and academics working on sexuality and rights to Columbia as fellows. The goal was to give activists space to reflect on the theoretical implications of their work, and theorists a chance to consider practical effects. I was never a fellow in the program, but I went to many of its workshops and meetings, so I can say with perfect objectivity that it not only brought together uniquely gifted groups of people, but gave a great many of them a second lease on their thinking and working lives. The Nation quotes Rebecca Jordan-Young, a professor of women’s studies at Barnard and a onetime student of Vance’s: “Truly there is nobody else that mentors with the intensity that Carole does … She’s being actively punished for being an extraordinary mentor—that’s the direction the corporate university is moving in.” Very true, but one thing the article doesn’t capture is how Vance’s extraordinary mentorship reaches beyond the borders of both the US and academia. She has fostered the dangerous mating of theory and practice among campaigners in places like India and Turkey, where she co-developed and co-directs an annual workshop for sexual rights activists from around the world. Like the best of teachers, she makes spaces where people realize things for themselves. “Dr. Vance is remarkable,” an Indian activist commented in an e-mail I saw this week. “She has changed the way we think.”

Vance (L) and Rebecca Jordan-Young

It’s here that Columbia’s decision is particularly menacing. Internationally, two groups in particular have benefited from Vance’s powerful thinking and teaching: LGBT activists, through her work on sexuality, and — through her cliché-breaking work on trafficking — activists defending sex workers’ rights. Anybody who’s even dabbled in these fields knows that LGBT rights remain underresourced, and sex work issues — unless you want to eradicate it, of course — face a pathetic dearth of funding.

Columbia has a pretty panoply of anti-discrimination policies that claim to protect LGBT people (sex workers, as always, are left unprotected); but its decision here, along with the implications of its funding policies, constitutes active discrimination. Research aimed at amplifying rights protections for these two groups is not, under current conditions, going to be a magnet for funds. (As Columbia well knows, the US government, the public health school’s major funder, has spent years trying to shut down or censor research and advocacy on sex workers’ rights.) The Mailman School’s policies, and the precedent it’s set, mean nobody specializing in that work is likely to be on staff in the foreseeable future. That’s discrimination. It’s also a disgrace to an institution of alleged learning. The university is abdicating its duty to be an impartial arbiter of knowledge and surrendering it to funders, who get to dictate its research directions and thus their conclusions — and who are in no sense impartial. That $8 billion endowment is useless unless it exists to prevent this.

When research in these areas is so underfunded, a policy like Columbia’s also forces scholars into a competition for scarce resources with the very communities they’re trying to serve. This is especially immoral. Traditionally, universities saw a duty to the broader world: to use their resources in disseminating knowledge where it is most needed. Columbia has abdicated that too. Instead, the university sits preening like a Roman emperor in the Coliseum, watching its own professors forced to battle it out with a few barbarian activists for the scraps they need to live. Unlike the Roman gladiatorial combats, there aren’t even any spectators – the fights aren’t exciting enough to draw in the distraction-hungry masses. The only people entertained are the university administrators, who must have a sick and solitary sense of fun.

Public health is and has always been an ambivalent profession. On the one hand there are the ethical and genuinely selfless practitioners who care about the public and the sundered individuals who make it up: their mythic stories fill a film like Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion, wherethe heroes fight disease with everything they’ve got and get carried out in body bags. On the other hand, the field has a long history of loving power, and serving the ambitions of those who have it. Surveillance, contact tracing, quarantines, sterilization, the fantasies of eugenics, the hygienic justifications for police control: all these are also part of its past, and sometimes of its present. Governmentality, in the Foucauldian sense, has been well served by public health, indeed was bound up with it from the outset.

Knights in white satin: How public health sees itself

Nietzsche wrote: “The ‘freedom’ that the state bestows on certain men for the sake of philosophy is, properly speaking, no freedom at all, but an office that maintains its holder.” Education is not offered by office-holders but by thinkers. The Mailman School’s funding policies cater to the worst in public health, and bring back the most disreputable impulses in its history. They force professors to kowtow to power: either government power or the power of capital. They imperil the ethical advances that have tried to reshape the field. They silence critical questions. They discourage conversations about rights. They ignore students while misusing the money they’ve paid for their educations. They ensure that unpopular and marginal groups will go unrepresented in the work of the institution. They discredit a distinguished — and wealthy — university.

Petitions to support Vance and Hopper can be found here. Please sign. There’s a Tumblr (this is 2014: there’s always a Tumblr) set up by students to fight the firings: it’s here. It includes various letters of protest, which you may take as models should you want to write the Dean directly (lpfried@columbia.edu). The critical thinking you save may ultimately become your own.